Spike Magazine

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
TV. But now I’m back.”
And with an increased workload, most significantly
the Neuromancer film. After countless rumours, director
Chris Cunningham has finally been announced to
helm the feature. Cunningham is a 20-something prodigy,
best known for his dark, off-beat music videos for
Bjork, Aphex Twin and Madonna. He’s also a student
of the late Stanley Kubrick … but he’s never directed a
Hollywood feature. So how on earth did he get this job?
“He was brought to my attention by someone else.
We were told, third-hand, that he was extremely chary
of the Hollywood process, and wouldn’t return calls.
But someone else told us that Neuromancer had been
his Wind In The Willows, that he’d read it when he was
12. I went to London and we met.”
After the debacle that was Johnny Mnemonic, Gibson
is understandably coy about the whole process. Johnny
Mnemonic was also directed by a Hollywood novice,
avant-garde artist Robert Longo. Gibson once told me
that the film they made was “More like Blue Velvet.”
Clearly not the same film that ended up on the silver
screen, then. What makes him so sure this one will turn
out right?
“Chris is my own 100 per cent personal choice,”
he says firmly. “My only choice. The only person
I’ve met who I thought might have a hope in hell of
doing it right.
“I went back to see him in London just after he’d
BUY William Gibson books online from and
finished the Bjork video, and I sat on a couch beside
this dead sex little Bjork robot, except it was wearing
Aphex Twin’s head. We talked. And we’re still talking.”
Unfortunately, that’s all he’ll say: “I’ve learned
that discussing these projects doesn’t really help
them to happen.”
So let’s talk about technology. Despite the impact
his work has had on real-world science, most of
Gibson’s fiction is clearly about people and humanity
rather than technology itself. Why does he write science
fiction at all?
“Because I believe that most social change is now
technologically-driven, and that new technologies
are very seldom – almost never, really – legislated
into existence.”
Interesting, because Gibson has also admitted many
times that he simply “makes the technology up”. That
was certainly the case with Neuromancer, where the
worldwide virtual network was actually inspired by
watching children become absorbed in arcade games.
Does he still do that?
“I do make it up, to a certain extent. But it isn’t the
toys themselves, the specific tech bits, that I’m genuinely
concerned with – rather the way in which new
technologies impact the social animal in ways that the
developers of these technologies never thought of.”
Is the Gibson household swamped with subscriptions
to New Scientist and Astrophysics Today, then?
238
More
Spike
email
RSS
Facebook
Twitter
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z